Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 95 UI Design

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 312 posts

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#11

Post by agumonkey »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…

It was a crossroad of limited computing affordance and abstraction necessity.

I grew up in CGI land, basically high end CGI programs were what the latest web app is. Reactive redrawing of free form geometries. I wanted this to be mainstream so bad. I got old and it became slightly true. Not keeping aside the drift of website content and pop overs.. something hit me. My brain doesn't want real time and free floating. I want abstraction, solid, and patient. It even contradicts my love for lisp repls (another form of low latency feedback). I look at 90s desktop GUIs with a bit more love and appreciation. They were limited just enough, the limitation forced abstraction and organization. And most of the time it was just right (you could remove spooky side effects, and add a bit of genericity it wouldn't hurt).

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#12

Post by pvg »

UI is different on the web and mobile devices but if you fire up the Win 10 file explorer, almost all of the items shown are still there or arguably better. Maybe resize (which you can now do from any window edge) is a little more finicky.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#14

Post by agumonkey »

_trampeltier wrote: post #7

Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.

Do not worry for the market is ready for this. Iphone started with fixed backgrounds, then later they demonstrated the oh so amazing feature of custom backgrounds. In some 80s computer chronicles episode you can find the ex-act-same-speech from a windows sales rep explaining how win 1.0 was limited, but now you can set up your own background pattern. iOS 15 will introduce ML generated computer vision trained custom themed that fits the most seen colours in your rooms.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#15

Post by notadoc »

Windows 95 had an obvious UI, but was rather cluttered.

The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel. The modern Mac experience is no where near that simple, particularly since the Yosemite UI overhaul.

The original iPad had pretty great UI design too, until the iOS 7 redesign. Now I think it's probably the most confusing UI that exists on a modern OS. Nothing is obvious. Multitasking and copy/paste on iPad is befuddling to even the smartest and most technical people I know.

UI design that was perfected 30+ years ago has been completely shelved and lost by designers who are designing for other designers and their portfolios, rather than for users.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#17

Post by Ididntdothis »

twotwotwo wrote: post #6

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an an…

Just wait a little. Soon there will be a movement for UI consistency and they will reinvent a lot of stuff Apple and MS did about UI in the 90s. Just give it a fancy new name. You can see this on the iPad. Suddenly you have multiple windows, keyboard, just in slightly different form.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#18

Post by goatlover »

pcurve wrote: post #10
twotwotwo wrote: post #6

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an an…

25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers. Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility. Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.

There is the menu element, but I guess it was just meant to be semantic and didn't really catch on. I think JS killed the adding of more GUI elements to HTML. Developers prefer their libraries. It's weird how things progress in three steps forward, two backward kind of way. The web has certainly illustrated that in many ways.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#19

Post by egypturnash »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #17
twotwotwo wrote: post #6

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an an…

Just wait a little. Soon there will be a movement for UI consistency and they will reinvent a lot of stuff Apple and MS did about UI in the 90s. Just give it a fancy new name. You can see this on the iPad. Suddenly you have multiple windows, keyboard, just in slightly different form.

And absolutely no documentation on how it works. I've turned the multiple windows stuff off on the iPad because it's so damn inconsistent and incomprehensible.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#20

Post by petilon »

The Windows 95 UI was inspired by NextStep. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...

Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif

Post reply on HN